Effect of offering Insects, Larve, and Pupe to Birds. 463 
LIX.—WNotes made during the Summer of 1887 on the Effect 
of offering various Insects, Larve, and Pupe to Birds. By 
ARTHUR G. BUTLER, F.L.S., F.Z.S., &e. 
A FEw weeks ago I received an envelope by post containing 
all the letters and notes which I sent to Mr. Poulton in 1887. 
Nowordof explanationaccompanied this missive; and although 
such an action appeared hardly in accordance with my, perhaps 
strained, ideas of strict courtesy, I could not but presume that 
the envelope must have been forwarded by Mr. Poulton. 
That the short communication which I published in the 
‘Annals’ for August should be assumed to be intended for 
a personal attack upon Mr. Poulton never entered my head; 
indeed, 1 supposed that he, in common with all who delight 
in the study of natural history, would have welcomed any 
facts, even though apparently adverse to a pet theory, which 
tended to throw light upon a subject which he had long and 
eagerly studied 
Few things ever astonished me more than the hostile atti- 
tude which Mr. Poulton assumed with regard to that innocent 
paper, or the cruel misconstructions which he put upon the 
most harmless remarks made therein; that my comment 
touching the repeated reproduction of a few comparatively 
unimportant observations of my own should have been dislo- 
cated into a claim to the origination of Wallace’s theory is 
too absurd to be considered seriously. In spite of my much- 
valued friend Mr. Weir’s careful experiments, as also those of 
Messrs. Fritz Miiller, Weismann, and Poulton, I still insist 
that, so long as a few desultory observations are incessantly 
forced into a front place, it is an evidence of how little has 
hitherto been done, upon which to establish the truth of a 
theory ; many more observers are wanted, and all their obser- 
vations must be impartially treated if we are to arrive at 
exact scientific truth. 
I was not aware that Mr. Poulton had made a selection of 
‘the most interesting results” of my recent experiments for 
publication in the Report of the British Association, or I 
should not have said “ so far nothing seems to have come of 
it; ” nevertheless, as it is impossible for any one man to 
judge how far even apparently uninteresting results may 
eventually tell for or against a theory—as, too, Mr. Poulton 
has evidently forgotten some of those facts when he comments 
upon Zeuzera cesculi and the size of the spiders offered to 
